The “Inscrutable” Voices of Asian-Anglophone Fiction

Through the use of first-person narrators, writers like Weike Wang, the author of “Chemistry,” are engaging with the enduring stereotype of Asian impersonality in order to overturn it.

Illustration by Joan Wong

The narrator of Weike Wang’s début novel, “Chemistry,” published earlier
this year, is an unnamed female chemistry Ph.D. student navigating
American academia and modern romance. She is also the daughter of
ambitious Chinese parents who immigrated to the United States after the
Cultural Revolution. The novel repeatedly upends our expectations: it’s
a bildungsroman in which the heroine doesn’t so much go out into the
world to conquer it as go out into the world to only gradually turn
inward.

The book’s most striking attribute is the narrator’s voice: clipped,
understated, and curiously affectless. Here, for instance, she describes
the difference between her life’s trajectory and that of her white
Midwestern boyfriend, Eric, who is also a chemistry grad student:

I am certain that Eric will get the job. His career path is very
straight, like that of an arrow to its target.

If I were to draw my path out, it would look like a gas particle
flying around in space.

The lab mate often echoes the wisdom of many chemists before her. You
must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love
chemistry unconditionally.

Voice, that ephemeral yet indelible quality, poses a challenge for
critics: it is embedded in language but seems to hover just beyond it.
And more than other similarly amorphous literary effects—tone, mood,
atmosphere—voice seems intimately connected to the human speaker behind
the text. Indeed, as I read
“Chemistry,”
I found myself identifying not only with Wang’s protagonist—we’re both
female Chinese immigrant grad students in America—but also with Wang
herself, who, like me, was born in China in 1989. Wang’s first-person
voice, in other words, returned me to my own.

I was also reminded, by the voice, of other books that are not so near
to my experience but which all might be classified as works of
Asian-Anglophone fiction. I thought, for instance, of the dispassionate
first-person narrators in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels; of Chang-rae Lee’s
similarly evasive, if not entirely affectless, speaker in his novel “A
Gesture Life”; of Ed Park’s office novel “Personal Days,” which features
a distinctively impersonal first-person plural voice. I thought of Tao
Lin’s Internet-age autofiction. The backgrounds of these writers vary
widely: Ishiguro is the son of Japanese immigrants to England; Lin is
the son of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States; Lee and Park are
Korean-American. But all of them, in their work, have employed voices
that seem unusually detached—voices that are often later reattached, by
critics and other readers, to the authors themselves. (There are, of
course, many more Asian-Anglophone writers who don’t downplay affect in
their fiction, from Gish Jen to Alexander Chee to Jenny Zhang and so
on—it’s a long list, and Lee himself has written more lyrical narrators,
such as Henry Park in “Native Speaker.”)

“Asian-American” as a pan-ethnic identity category is a newish
construction, one that unites people, sometimes awkwardly, from
dramatically disparate cultures. As Jay Caspian Kang wrote recently in
the Times Magazine, “Discrimination is what really binds
Asian-Americans
together.”
In the West, the Asiatic figure has long been associated with aloofness
and obfuscation, as exemplified by the notion of the “inscrutable
Oriental.” The image is rife in fiction and poetry, found in the writing
of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder. The
phenomenon persists in contemporary literary fiction, as in the
affective alienness of David Mitchell’s dystopian Korean community in
“Cloud Atlas,” or Adam Johnson’s navigation of North Korea in “The
Orphan Master’s Son,” through the character of Jun Do. (The pun is
intended.)

Against this tradition, there is, perhaps, another emerging, of
Asian-Anglophone writers who both play with and thus begin to undo these
tropes of Asian impersonality. The novels by Ishiguro, Park, Lin, and
Wang all feature first-person narrators who keep their distance—actively
denying readers direct interior access. This is true, it’s important to
note, even when the characters they write are not themselves Asian. From
Ishiguro’s famously oblique British-butler narrator in “The Remains of
the Day”—whose voice has since become a hallmark of Ishiguro’s style—to
Lin’s impassive young people, these protagonists, created by vastly
different writers, work against standard ideas of rich novelistic
subjectivity. These writers seem to be engaging with enduring
stereotypes in order to overturn them.

Sunny Xiang, an assistant professor of English at Yale, is writing a
book about how post-Cold War Asian-American novels represent literary
voices as “Asian.” Xiang is interested not only in the racialized
stereotype of the inscrutable Oriental but also in Orientalist
scrutability—that is, those literary factors that make a narrative
voice scan, for readers, as Asian. I told Xiang about my reaction to
Wang’s book. She said that when a reader is confronted with an
unplaceable or “inscrutable” voice, “an intuitive response seems to be
the interpretive gesture you’re describing—that of reattaching the voice
by way of the author or the reader. For you, it was the shared
biographical profile that provided the most reliable footing, even if
you weren’t relying on this footing for the purpose of interpretation.”

I decided to ask Wang if she saw things the way I did. But, when
I suggested a reading of “Chemistry” in terms of the trope of Asian
affectlessness, she demurred. Over the phone, she explained that she
didn’t see her heroine as primarily Chinese or, for that matter, as
primarily female but, first and foremost, as analytical. “I wanted the
narrator to be very self-aware,” she said, “to have that scientific lens
that’s a little bit objective but also crazy.” Of course, one might
trace that attribute in part to China’s postwar prioritization of
scientific pursuits as the path toward upward mobility and economic
expansion—another Asian-American stereotype is the science nerd.

All of the characters in “Chemistry” are left nameless except for Eric,
the narrator’s boyfriend. (Even he gets only a first name.) I suggested
to Wang that there was something impersonal about this absence of names;
she saw it, she told me, as a matter of scientific categories: there’s
the dog, the lab partner, the shrink, the immigrant parents, the best
friend, the cheating husband, the nanny. Chemistry is a generalizing
process, Wang explained, in which you “build a small rule that applies
to everything.”

In “Chemistry,” character depth is established, unexpectedly, through a
kind of under-telling. The narrator’s Chinese immigrant parents—who are,
perhaps not incidentally, the novel’s most obviously racialized
characters—achieve interiority precisely because they appear at first to
so dogmatically eschew it. In college, the narrator learns that, when
her father was young, he carried his dying sister on his back to see a
doctor, and that his sister died on the way there. She hadn’t even known
that he had a sister. It is “the Chinese way,” she explains, “to keep
your deepest feelings inside and then build a wall that can be seen from
the moon.” As the novel progresses, “the narrator realizes that her
parents have thoughts that are separate from hers,” as Wang put it to
me. The parents have kept their stories from their daughter, and her
evasive narrative voice echoes what we come to understand is their own.
By the end, we have an idea of all that has not yet been said.

Although Wang does not think of her narrator as primarily Chinese, it’s
impossible to read the narrator’s story without sensing the history
behind it. The narrator in “Chemistry” worries that she will always lag
behind her white boyfriend. “Please stop, just for a little while, and
let me catch up,” she thinks. “How do you expect me to marry you if you
never let me catch up?” When we spoke, Wang connected China’s economic
and cultural “behindness” after the Cultural Revolution—which had
precipitated not only political upheaval but also economic and cultural
stagnation—to her protagonist’s anxieties. “You have this void you’re
trying to fill all the time,” she said. “And that’s why she latches onto
Eric: he is such a full person. For her, there’s something missing.”

Ed Park offered me a different perspective. In “Personal
Days,”
Park, like Wang, avoids proper names. Writing in the first-person
plural, he employs a “we” narrator who dissolves private individuality
and personhood by referencing the anonymous tone of corporate
bureaucracy. That foreclosed the possibility of having an explicitly
Asian protagonist, and Park told me that he “didn’t want the voice to
function as a clue” to the identity of the characters.

When I asked him about the idea I’d been forming about Asian-Anglophone
fiction, he told me that, for him, at least, Ishiguro’s influence was
indeed essential. “ ‘The Remains of the Day’ was an important book for
me twenty-five years ago—I was fascinated by the idea of an author of
Asian ancestry writing so outside his skin,” he said. “I hadn’t read
anything like that before, and it seemed to open up so many
possibilities.” After this first encounter, Park read Ishiguro’s first
two novels, “A Pale View of Hills,” which is told from the perspective
of a woman trapped in a Gothic domestic plot in postwar Japan, and “An
Artist of the Floating World,” which is about a Japanese painter who
ends up making Fascist propaganda art during the Second World War. Both
novels use a voice that is startlingly even-toned for all the horrors
their stories suggest. They anticipate the distinctly English narrators
of almost all of Ishiguro’s subsequent novels.

Critics have frequently asked Ishiguro whether there is anything
fundamentally Japanese about his staid characters—even, perhaps
especially, the English butler. He has usually directed such questioners
to Britain’s own tradition of repression and circumlocution. He has also
often described his intent to write about universal matters—and that
offers another way of thinking about his narrators’ uncanny tone. This
sentiment is echoed by novelists such as Ha Jin and Haruki Murakami,
both of whom have expressed a concern for how their prose will
translate. Paradoxically, for Asian writers, the attempt to be universal
can make one vulnerable to essentializing.

When we spoke, Wang described something similar. In her own reading of
Asian-American literature, she said, she found “that the race issue is
always very prominent—that there’s an Asian-American protagonist and
they think a certain way.” She wanted to come at things “from a
different angle . . .
to explain the experience through something a little
more universal.” That, she said, is why she didn’t name the narrator, or
the school that she attends: “I wanted to create the sense of a world
without pinpointing the specificity of it.”

For his part, Park told me that his reading of Ishiguro’s books left him
wondering how much of Ishiguro’s ultimate success coincided with his
eventual choice not to write about Asian subjects—and Park hinted that
his next novel will explicitly address questions of Korean ethnicity.
Xiang, meanwhile, considers Ishiguro an outlier: “I’d wager that it has
been extremely hard for writers already marked as ‘Asian Anglophone’ to
disaffiliate from the category,” she told me. In October, Ishiguro’s
outlier status seemed to be confirmed when he was named the recipient of
the 2017 Nobel Prize in
Literature,
which, more than any other award, signals international prestige. The
Nobel committee, in its citation, celebrated Ishiguro as a writer “who,
in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our
illusory sense of connection with the world.”

Talking with Wang, Park, and Xiang made me question why, as a reader, I
feel so compelled to identify with—and indeed, to racialize—first-person
Asian narrators who are flat, impersonal, and recessive. In our
conversation about literary voice, Xiang said that “the perceived
strength or weakness of affect is related to our ability to ‘place,’
‘locate,’ or ‘identify’ voice in a text.” Was it the lack of “place” in
a narrator’s voice—both in terms of material geographical grounding as
well as metaphysical qualities, such as interiority and psychology—that
allowed me to find myself in it?

Perhaps that’s part of the answer. But I’m not sure that it fully
explains my reaction to “Chemistry.” There are, I think, shared
experiences that many Anglo-Asian and Asian-American writers find
themselves responding to—and, increasingly, a set of previous books that
influence their own. In earlier works of Asian-Anglophone literary
fiction—from Sui Sin Far’s “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1912) to Younghill
Kang’s “East Goes West” (1937), up through more recent novels, such as
Ishiguro’s “A Pale View of Hills” and Lee’s “Native Speaker”—the
immigrant narrative is central. These were novels by writers with deep
personal ties to East Asia. As writers like Wang, Park, Lin, and others
get further away from that narrative, they bring new story lines to the
fore, and find their own preoccupations. But they have also inherited
modes of writing and reading that an earlier historical moment produced.
As Wang told me, her narrator realizes, by the end of the novel, that
“she does have a rich cultural history; she just doesn’t necessarily
remember it.”